The discovery has been hailed as the ‘missing link’ in black hole documentation.

Tomoharu Oka, professor at Keio University in Japan and lead researcher in a paper that appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters about the discovery, said: ‘Considering the fact that no compact objects are seen in X-ray or infra-red observations, this, as far as we know, the best candidate for the compact massive object is a black hole.’

To put the size of the black hole into perspective – it ranges from several million to billions of times the mass of the Sun (the Sun is about 333,000 time the weight of Earth).